HOLSTON, James - Insurgent Citizenship

Insurgent Citizenship in an Era ofGlobal Urban Peripheries

JAMES HOLSTONUniversity of California, Berkeley

Abstractciso_1024 245..267

The extraordinary urbanization of the 20th century has produced urban peripheries ofdevastating poverty and inequality in cities worldwide. At the same time, the strugglesof their residents for the basic resources of daily life and shelter have also generatednew movements of insurgent citizenship based on their claims to have a right to the cityand a right to rights. The resulting contemporary metropolis is a site of collisionbetween forces of exploitation and dispossession and increasingly coherent, yet stillfragile and contradictory movements for new kinds of citizen power and social justice.This essay examines the entanglements of these insurgent urban citizenships both withentrenched systems of inequality and with new forms of destabilization and violence.Using the case of Brazil, it argues that these clashes entail conflicts of alternativeformulations of citizenship and that sites of metropolitan innovation often emerge atthe very sites of metropolitan degradation.

We live in a time of unprecedented global urbanization. In amatter of decades, countries that were mostly rural havebecome mostly urban. At the same time, we live in an era of

unprecedented global democratization. Since 1970, the number of elec-toral democracies has doubled, increasing in just thirty years from 33 to63 percent of the world’s sovereign states. Urbanization and democra-tization are deeply related transformations. Not only have their globalscope and speed been extraordinary but their combined developmentsin particular places have also produced a remarkably similar conditionworldwide: most city people live in impoverished urban peripheries invarious conditions of illegal and irregular residence, around urbancenters that benefit from their services and their poverty. Yet this newurbanism also generates a characteristic response: precisely in theseperipheries, residents organize movements of insurgent citizenship toconfront the entrenched regimes of citizen inequality that the urbancenters use to segregate them. Not all peripheries produce this kind ofinsurgence, to be sure. But enough do to qualify this collision of citi-zenships as a global category of conflict.

The results of these processes of urbanization and democratizationhave been contradictory. If the latter would seem to hold special promisefor more egalitarian citizenships, and thus for greater citizen justice anddignity, in practice most democracies experience tremendous conflict

DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2009.01024.x.

among citizens as principle collides with prejudice over the terms ofnational membership and the distribution of rights. If cities have histori-cally been the locus of citizenship’s expansion, contemporary peripheralurbanization creates especially volatile conditions, as city regions becomecrowded with marginalized citizens and noncitizens who contest theirexclusions. Thus the insurgence of urban democratic citizenships inrecent decades has disrupted established formulas of rule and privilege inthe most diverse societies worldwide. Yet the result is an entanglement ofdemocracy with its counters, in which new kinds of urban citizens arise toexpand democratic citizenships and new forms of urban violence andinequality erode them.

In this essay, I focus on conflicts specific to these entanglements ofcitizenship. Foremost, I want to show that these insurgent citizenshipsconfront the entrenched with alternative formulations of citizenship; inother words, that their conflicts are clashes of citizenship and not merelyidiosyncratic or instrumental protest and violence. In making this point,my aim is also to show that although insurgent urban citizenships mayutilize central civic space and even overrun the center, they are funda-mentally manifestations of peripheries. In so far as the urban civic squareembodies an idea of centrality and its sovereignties, its architecturaldesign, institutional organization, and use represents the hierarchies,legalities, segregations, and inequalities of the entrenched regime ofcitizenship that the insurgent contests. The forces of centrality areentrenched in the civic square by design and that entrenchment estab-lishes the terms of an official public sphere. Insurgent movements mayadopt these terms to frame their protests—property rights, urban infra-structure, justice, even motherhood, for example. But whereas the centeruses the structuring of the public to segregate the urban poor in theperipheries and to reduce them to a “bare life” of servility, the very samestructures of inequality incite these hinterland residents to demand a lifeworthy of citizens.

My point is that it is not in the civic square that the urban poorarticulate this demand with greatest force and originality. It is rather inthe realm of everyday and domestic life taking shape in the remote urbanperipheries around the construction of residence. It is an insurgence thatbegins with the struggle for the right to have a daily life in the city worthyof a citizen’s dignity. Accordingly, its demands for a new formulation ofcitizenship get conceived in terms of housing, property, plumbing,daycare, security, and other aspects of residential life. Its leaders are the“barely citizens” of the entrenched regime: women, manual laborers,squatters, the functionally literate, and, above all, those in families witha precarious stake in residential property, with a legal or illegal toehold toa houselot somewhere far from elite centers. These are the citizens who,in the process of building and defending their residential spaces, not onlyconstruct a vast new city but, on that basis, also propose a city with adifferent order of citizenship.

That citizenship and its rights have become both the medium andthe message of these struggles is a recent and still emerging transfor-

the result is an

entanglement of

democracy with its

counters, in which

new kinds of urban

citizens arise to

expand democratic

citizenships and

new forms of urban

violence and

inequality erode

City & Society

mation of urban conflict. It is especially an achievement of the poor incities of the global south who have posed their struggles of urban lifemuch more in terms of residence and basic everyday resources than interms of the kinds of conflicts of labor and factory discipline that char-acterized working-class movements in Europe during the last century.When, in Paris in the 1960s, Henri Lefebvre (1996) published hisincitement to change the world by renewing the right to urban life, heimagined “the right to the city” as emerging from the struggles inherentin the daily lives of poor residents. He predicted that the priorities ofthis struggle would shift from “production to reproduction” as the“urban revolution” overwhelmed the world. Although roundly criti-cized from within the Marxist tradition in which he wrote for empha-sizing this shift—by Castells (1977) and Harvey (1973) in their classicworks, for example—it seems clear today that he was correct.

However, the conflicts that consolidated this revolution as a questionof rights to the city occurred not in Paris but primarily in cities of themetropolitan south, like São Paulo and Johannesburg. Moreover, inmoving south, so to speak, the foundations of this right developed inways that Lefebvre did not suppose, either conceptually or empirically.Lefebvre understood the right to the city as a claim by the working classesto a presence in the city that legitimated their appropriation of urbanspaces and their refusal to be excluded from them. Although one mayargue that Lefebvre’s understanding is ultimately based on a Marxistnotion of needs, his right to the city remains nevertheless unmoored toany framework or formulation that would articulate it as a right. If a rightis a kind of social relation that distributes various sorts of powers andliabilities between people, then in Lefebvre’s conceptualization it seemsfree-floating and devoid of such relationality. Certainly, it arises as hesupposed in the conflicts of flesh-and-blood agents. However, Lefebvredoes not theorize it in terms of any articulation of social relatedness otherthan conflict itself on the one hand and, on the other, a vanguard ofintellectuals (philosophers, artists, and planners) who give it the sense ofan oeuvre. So why call it “right” if it does not refer to any objective rulethat generates subjective power or does not articulate needs in terms of aspecific set of claims, powers, and obligations sanctioned in law?

If we follow the development of struggles over daily life among thedispossessed of global urbanization since Lefebvre wrote, we discover thatindeed an insurgent notion of right to the city emerged among them incircumstances of degradation and peripheralness. However, the right tothe city that was for Lefebvre (1996:158) “like a cry and a demand” in1967 lost its metaphorical quality and became moored to a particulararticulation that he did not imagine—indeed, that Marxism has consis-tently criticized if not rejected. For many of the urban poor, it became aspecific kind of demand: a claim of citizens, a citizen right, a rightarticulated within the framework of citizenship and its legal, ethical, andperformative terms. In the last few decades, precisely people uprootedand dispossessed by the 20th century’s unprecedented urbanizationdeveloped urban peripheries as their place in the city. They did so by

InsurgentCitizenship in an

Era of GlobalUrban Peripheries

building their own shelter and way of life, generally appropriating thecity’s soil through some from of illegal residence and demanding legal-ization and legal access to resources. Especially in the global south, theyarticulated this appropriation as rights of urban citizenship, the right toinhabit the city becoming a right to rights that constituted an agenda ofcitizenship. Such agendas are by no means necessarily just, good, oregalitarian. They may be nativist, racist, communalist, and elitist, quali-ties that Lefebvre did not anticipate. But they have made many auto-constructed metropolises strategic arenas for the development of newformulations of citizenship in large measure based on the struggles ofresidents of the urban peripheries for rights to urban residence, for theright to reside with dignity, security, and mobility.

Insurgent citizenship movements have now been described in manyregions of the global south. In most cases, they coalesce through orga-nized movements of poor urban citizens confronting entrenched nationalregimes of citizen inequality. To date, they have emerged most fully in anumber of Latin American countries and in South Africa, where thetransformations of urban citizenship have produced national ones as well.The Brazilian case has been extensively studied in these terms beginningin the 1980s (e.g., Abers 2000; Avritzer 2004; Baiocchi 2005; Caldeira2000; Holston 2008), as has the Bolivian somewhat later (see Postero2007). As Murray (2008), Beall et al. (2002), and others show, the SouthAfrican examples are like the Latin American in that new formulationsof urban citizenships and their distributions of rights unsettle nationalcitizenship while remaining dangerously unstable themselves. Cases fromAsia demonstrate similar developments. In Thailand, as in Brazil andSouth Africa, squatter movements have organized nationally aroundparticipatory urban planning initiatives based on new conceptions ofrights to the city (Somsook 2005). In India, Patel et al. (2002) andAppadurai (2002) show how struggles for urban infrastructure ignite newkinds of organizations and strategic thinking among squatters. Theseorganizations are able to form alliances with middle-class, non-governmental, and international groups in terms that emphasize theircitizen rights, thereby providing alternatives to client patronage andcreating new modes of Indian democracy. Beijing’s “floating population”of illegal residents redefines China’s official regime of urban citizenshipby claiming and exploiting new spaces in the city as successful entrepre-neurs (Zhang 2001).1

The idea that this global peripheral urbanization produces new kindsof active citizens and citizenships contrasts sharply with the predictionsof urban social and environmental catastrophe that have never been inshort supply. Their 19th-century versions presented urban problems asdiseases of the social body and provided urban reformers justifications forthe “Haussmannization” of cities throughout Europe and the Americas.These interpretations turned some urban populations into “dangerousclasses” and targeted them for both scientific study and policing.2

Recently, a new round of books with alarming titles about city “slums”and their “billions of slum dwellers” feed an evidently large professional

The idea that this

global peripheral

urbanization

produces new kinds

of active citizens

and citizenships

contrasts sharply

with the predictions

of urban social and

environmental

catastrophe that

have never been in

short supply

City & Society

and popular appetite for apocalyptic descriptions of planetary degrada-tion due to current urbanization.3 I do not doubt that many people liveand work in miserable urban conditions, suffering brutally from segrega-tion and pollution. My point is rather that the terms of this urbancatastrophe genre—especially the lead term slum—homogenize and stig-matize a global urban population. It is not only that these terms imme-diately identify “billions” of people with horrific urban conditions. It isalso that the stigma of slum leaves little space for their dignity andvitality. It squashes people into totalizing characterizations and, in thatreductive way, reproduces an over-determination of urban poverty thathas difficulty recognizing emergent spaces of invention and agency.

The problem I raise here is not only one of confronting homog-enization with anthropological difference, though that confrontation isitself crucial both to undermine imperial regimes of knowledge andpolicy and to detect potentials for different futures. It is not, in otherwords, only an empirical question of demonstrating that processes ofurbanization are always multilayered, entangled, and contradictory.Although such superimpositions create complex cityscapes, my argu-ment is not only about inevitable anthropological complexity. It is alsoand most importantly about showing that sites of metropolitan innovationoften emerge at the very sites of metropolitan degradation. My argumentis thus about developing concepts that can discern this kind ofinsurgence.

To do so requires studying contemporary urban conditions through acombination of ethnography and history generally antithetical to theurban catastrophe genre, which thrives on the bird’s eye view of historyto aggrandize predictions. As it hovers outside and above, this viewcannot recognize “slums” as places in which residents use their ingenuityto create daily a world of adaptations, connections, and strategies withwhich to inhabit modern metropolises on better terms than thoseimposed by the powerful local and international forces that would havethem segregated and servile. Such ingenuities regularly and predictablycoalesce into insurgent movements that redefine the nature of socialincorporation and the distribution of resources—movements, in short, ofnew urban citizenships.

To focus on this creativity is not to neglect the impositions of globalforces of capitalism, neoliberalism, IMF-styled democratization, and thelike. Nor is it in any way to deny factors of class and race in structuringurban life chances. Nor is it to wax romantic about the difficulties ofputting new citizenships into practice. But it is to rub these forces,factors, and difficulties against the grain of local vitalities, to show thatthey do not preclude them, and that they are, often, reshaped by them.In resisting their reductions, it emphasizes the capacity of “slum-dwellers” to produce something new that cannot be readily assimilatedinto established conceptual frameworks. To emphasize the creativity ofpractice is also to bring to the surface that very possibility among themany conditions that exist as potentials in the city. In that way, devel-oping a paradigm of analysis of contemporary urbanization that reveals

such insurgence is to produce critical research that is not totalizing,reductive, or complacent.

Insurgent Performances

In what follows, I give several examples of insurgent citizenship frommy research in Brazil that begin in the peripheries and work their wayto the civic square. The first takes place in neighborhoods of the poor

peripheries of São Paulo where I have worked for over fifteen years.These peripheries were settled by workers in the 1960s who builttheir own homes—through a process called autoconstruction(autoconstrução)—on lots without any infrastructure that they purchasedon installment plans from private land speculators. Autoconstructioncontinues today as a principal means of residence for the urban poor,both in the neighborhoods in which I work which are now mostly settled,and in new neighborhoods of the ever-expanding peripheries.4

One day, in 1972, an official from the São Paulo courts went toJardim das Camélias to notify residents that a writ of possession had beenissued against them, ordering their eviction. It was the first indicationresidents had that their deed contracts were fraudulent and their tenurein jeopardy. A crowd gathered in the streets as the news spread. When itencountered the official delivering his orders from house to house, themen assaulted him. They knocked him down, roughed him up, scatteredhis papers, and chased him out of the neighborhood. He returned withthe police, who arrested several of the assailants. A group of residentscommandeered a truck and rode to the police station to spring them.Several more were arrested. Over the next few weeks, residents gatheredinto an association to fight the eviction—or, rather, were gathered bylocal politicians who suddenly appear offering their services—and hiredone of the lawyers accompanying them. Soon afterward, however, thelawyer was gunned down, murdered as he left one of the neighborhoodhouses. As one resident told me, “at that time, it was a war, between usand the land-scammers. The law didn’t exist. The only law was might; itwas violence. We didn’t know anything about rights. All we knew was tobeat up the court official.”

Thirty-one years later, in 2003, another official came to a differentbut similar neighborhood in which I also work, Lar Nacional, to demandthe cancellation of a resident’s title to his houselot because of a discrep-ancy in measurements. The courts had recently issued this title as anoriginal deed of ownership by virtue of adverse possession—a statutorymethod of obtaining original title by demonstrating certain kinds ofpossession over an uninterrupted period of time. Organized by theirneighborhood association, residents had spent more than ten years peti-tioning the courts for such validation. This was the first case to returnfrom the justice system favorably judged, by which the resident receiveda new title in his name with its own site plan and tax number. Now, anofficial from the Municipal Treasury Department wanted it cancelled

City & Society

because the measurements recorded on the title did not match those onfile with the Department of Engineering. The residents knew why: Thearea’s developers had superimposed so many subdivision plans over theyears in their efforts to usurp land and swindle buyers that none corre-sponded to what had actually been built. As requested by the Associa-tion’s attorney, however, the courts had appointed an official appraiser ineach case of adverse possession to create an accurate site plan that wouldsupersede all other plans by defining the actual conditions of occupationas original for any title eventually issued.

Aguiar, an executive director of the Society of Friends of the Neigh-borhood, has followed all cases of land conflict in the area for over threedecades. As a result, he told me, “we of the Society were prepared,expecting that this [kind of contestation] would happen sooner or later.”Hence, the Association had issued standing orders to all residents:“Never enter into any polemic or fight with any official who appears atyour door; send him to the Society to talk.” When the Treasury officialclaimed that the resident’s “house was wrong,” as Aguiar put it, “we knewthat it wasn’t because we had the [new] title, ratified by the judge; and thejudge only ratified it based on the official appraiser, who is the eye of thelaw.” Armed with that knowledge, Aguiar confronted the Treasury offi-cial by law talking him. He defied him to produce a better document thanthe court-ratified title and site plan, one which would, he argued, have tooverturn the judge’s ruling. Moreover, he challenged the official “to lookfor the law,” by which he meant to find out exactly what the lawstipulated in this case, what the courts had ruled, and to what effect.Then, he meticulously explained to the official what he would find if hewent to all that trouble. He elucidated the purpose and consequences ofadverse possession, and he exhibited documents from the Society’sarchive to show that the earlier plans had been cancelled by court orderand superseded by the new title. In this manner, he rebutted the official’sclaim that the measurements were off because the resident hadencroached on someone else’s lot. After about an hour of this law talk,the official left, conceding that his claim seemed indeed to have “nomerit.” Neither he nor anyone else from the Treasury returned to pursuethe matter.5

What happened to residents of the poor urban periphery during thesethree decades that converted their violence into law talk, their belliger-ent reactions into the proactions of citizens using rights strategically?When I first went to Brazil in 1980, I noted that although peoplecertainly spoke about having particular rights, they seemed to considerthem conferred by statuses other than citizen, such as worker. When theyused “citizen,” it generally meant someone with whom they had norelation of any significance, an anonymous other, a “nobody”—a person,in fact, without rights, usually in an unfortunate circumstance. They saidit to make clear that the person was not family, friend, neighbor, acquain-tance, competitor, or anyone else with a familiar identity; to establish, inshort, not only the absence of a personal relation but also the rejection ofa commensurable one that would entail social norms applied in common.

“Citizen” indicated distance, anonymity, and uncommon ground. Thisformulation considered, moreover, that what such others deserve is thelaw—not law as rights but law as disadvantage and humiliation, a senseperfectly expressed in the Brazilian maxim “for friends, everything; forenemies, the law,” a sense enacted by the residents in 1972 who beat upthe court official. In 2003, however, the law talk of residents indicated aninversion of the assumptions of this maxim about what is near and far inthe social order.

Let me give another example of everyday encounters that have beentransformed by a new paradigm of citizenship. I was standing in line at abank in downtown São Paulo in the mid 1990s. Like most other inter-actions with bureaucracy in Brazil, bank lines are notorious for humili-ating the poor and the unprivileged. Lines are long because all bills (fromutility charges to installment payments to state fees) are paid at banksand because most people pay them in person. However, privileged cus-tomers do not wait in line. Those who have so-called special accounts getpreferential treatment from bank managers. Others employ errand “boys”to pay bills. A few other categories of people are privileged as well.Pregnant women, seniors, and the physically challenged have the right tocut the line or go to a special window. The rest wait. In my experience,unfortunately extensive in this regard, people in line do not complain, atleast publicly. When I asked fellow-line sufferers to explain why thepreference, privilege, or right of some and on what basis, they wouldshrug off the special treatment by saying “that’s the way it is for them”(the rich), or “it’s the law,” or “the bank authorizes it” (for certainpeople), pointing to a sign saying as much hung above a teller’s window.Sometimes, they would explain that these kinds of people deserve specialtreatment and the authorities recognize that. In other words, those Iasked raised issues of authority and the authorization of privilege, differ-ent rights for different categories of persons, relative public standing andworth, need and compensation, and resignation to the reinforcement ofsocial inequality in everyday public interactions. They did not raise issuesof fair treatment, accountability, or other aspects of equal worth.

These submissive responses to everyday negotiations of public stand-ing occur when citizenship disempowers citizens, strange as that mightseem. Empowerment happens when a citizen’s sense of an objectivesource of right in citizenship entails a corresponding sense of subjectivepower—power to change existing arrangements (legal and other), exactcompliance, compel behavior. In turn, such citizen power establishes theliability of others to it. However, when some people lack citizen power inrelation to other people, the latter benefit from an immunity, an absenceof liability. The one is powerless, the other immune. These relations ofpowerlessness for most and immunity for some precisely characterize thepublic realm of the entrenched regime of Brazilian citizenship dominantfor centuries.6

In the bank line, I recognized ahead of me a manicurist who works ina beauty salon near my home. I imagined the occupations of others inline: domestic workers, clerks, errand boys, drivers, store attendants,

“Citizen” indicated

distance,

anonymity, and

uncommon ground

City & Society

many of them people of color. Most, if not all, of them lived in theperipheries in neighborhoods like Jardim das Camélias and Lar Nacionaland commuted to work in the center. Nearer the front was a decidedlymore middle-class-looking man, dressed in a tie and jacket. Suddenly, ateenager cut the line in front of this man. He was dressed in a recogniz-ably middle-class style for his age. Neither the man nor the teenager—who would both have been called “white”—said a word to each other orexchanged a glance that I could see. At that point, the manicuriststepped forward and objected: “You can’t cut the line.” Others nodded,and someone added: “You can’t; your place is at the back.” The teenagersaid nothing and remained at the front. Then, the man in the tie andjacket turned to the manicurist and announced: “I authorize it.” If theman had said, “he’s my son,” “he’s my friend,” or even “he’s with me” thatwould surely have been a satisfactory explanation. But regardless ofwhether the two even knew each other, which was not clear, the manhad used the language, tone, and gesture of power and privilege. His wasa predictable response to achieve what he assumed would be the predict-able outcome of this classic encounter of Brazilian social identities inpublic space. Without retreating a step, however, the manicurist turnedthis world of assumptions upside-down: “This is a public space,” sheasserted, “and I have my rights. Here, you don’t authorize anything. Youdon’t rule [mandar]. You only rule in your kitchen and over your wife.”She replied with such assurance that the man turned around without aword, and the teenager went to the back of the line.

Leaving aside the issue of “kitchens and wives,” the manicurist’sperformance indicates the force of a new conviction about citizenshipamong the working classes. Her demand for respect and equality, asser-tion of rights in public and to the public, and realignment of class,gender, and race in the calculations of public standing are evidence notonly of being fed up with the old formula of civic assumptions. They alsoarticulate essential premises of a new formulation of citizenship. Theyestablish a radically common measure among Brazilians who are anony-mous to each other—neither friends nor enemies, but citizens who, forsome purposes, are equal.

This performance of a new civility has not, I stress, replaced thehistoric one of citizen privilege for some and degradation for many—asthe higher-class man assumed and tried to enact. Rather, the two formu-lations coexist, unhappily and dangerously, creating the mix of contra-dictory elements that constitutes Brazilian public space today. Thus,within a decade of the manicurist’s protest, banks massively installedautomated teller machines that offer equal access to most banking ser-vices. This was a technological change driven not only by massiveincreases in the number of poor Brazilians with bank accounts but also bytheir insistence on more equitable treatment. Yet most Brazilian banksalso responded to the latter by building entire branches or separatesections of existing branches that are exclusively reserved for their elitecustomers. Now, the rich and the poor have no contact at banks, and theproximity of different statuses that made social inequality palpable has

been eliminated. Thus the demand for greater equality and dignity hasalso produced new forms of separation and incivility in reaction. In fact,the severity of this reaction is proof that the insurgence of a new formu-lation of citizenship among the urban poor seriously threatens manylong-term and deeply entrenched assumptions about the compact ofBrazilian society.

Indeed, this insurgent citizenship finally marched out of the residen-tial peripheries, out of the everyday institutions like bank lines that hadbecome battlefields in this conflict of citizenships, and overran the centralcivic square itself. In 2002, I was in São Paulo for the victorious presiden-tial campaign of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers’ Party (PT). Itwas a massive, ecstatic victory that resignified the central spaces of SãoPaulo with the red banners of “citizenship,” “democracy,” and “socialjustice.” I realized that Brazilians voted for Lula not only to demand futurechange but also to acclaim as emblematically theirs a life-story about whathas already changed: a story of industrialization, urban migration, citytransformation, and citizen struggle that has remade Brazil in the last fiftyyears. It is a history that Lula personifies charismatically. Although he grewup poor in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, the urban conditions ofpoverty were not stagnant: he became both a factory worker and an urbanpioneer, as he and legions of other migrants powered São Paulo’s industrialboom and transformed its hinterland by turning the shacks they had tobuild for themselves into masonry homes and urbanizing their neighbor-hoods. Through their labor, they became modern industrial workers in theurban peripheries they constructed out of “bush.” By 1980, they had defiedmilitary rule to mobilize factories and founded a political party of theirown, the PT, that organized the periphery’s neighborhoods through a mixof left politics and popular Catholicism. After three failed presidentialbids, Lula and the PT won, with more than 60 percent of the national vote,by pledging to forge a “social pact” for all citizens and a “social justice” forthe poor.

Lula represents this laboring Brazil precisely because he comes fromthe autoconstructed peripheries in which a majority of Brazilians nowlive and in which they build their own houses, neighborhoods, and urbanlife. As my ethnographic examples of conflicts in everyday public spacesshow, they also construct a new realm of participation, rights, and citi-zenship in their urban practices. Lula embodies, in other words, not onlythe individual self-making of an immigrant and industrious São Paulo.He also exemplifies the collective experience of the city-making ofperipheries and their citizenry throughout Brazil. That Lula’s adminis-tration got sunk in profound corruption, having apparently traded itsproject of social justice for one of mere power, is another if tragic matterthat I cannot consider here. On that October night in 2002, his electionaffirmed the body and spirit of this complex autoconstruction, synthesiz-ing the unprecedented national force the peripheries had become. In justa few decades, the urban working classes had constructed a civic forcecapable of striking hard at that still dominant Brazil in which the his-torical norm of citizenship fosters exclusion, inequality, illegality, vio-

Thus the demand

for greater equality

and dignity has also

produced

new forms of

separation and

incivility in reaction

City & Society

lence, and the social logics of privilege and deference as the ground ofnational belonging. The development of the autoconstructed urbanperipheries had thus engaged a confrontation between two citizenships,one insurgent and the other entrenched. For a moment, at least, thelaw-talking and rights-acting citizens of the peripheries had taken overthe central square.

Differentiated citizenship

To follow the emergence of this new urban citizenship, we need tounderstand the existing conditions of working-class citizenshipwithin which alternatives developed. This is a complex historical

problem, as it is in the case of every city and its “slums.” The working-class development of São Paulo is grounded in a reiteration of centuries-old relations between land, labor, and law: in land policies designed toanchor a certain kind of labor force and in illegalities that initiatesettlement and precipitate the legalization of property claims. The resi-dential illegalities of today’s peripheries repeat these old patterns. Butthey do so with an unexpected outcome that, ultimately, generates newformulations of citizenship. Given the historical depth of these patternsand the limitations of space in this essay, I can only give the briefestsketch.7

To consolidate their rule of the new nation-state at the beginning ofthe 19th century, Brazil’s landed elites formulated a regime of citizenshipusing social differences that were not the basis of national membership—differences of education, property, race, gender, and occupation—to dis-tribute different treatment to different categories of citizens. It therebygenerated a gradation of rights among them, in which most rights areavailable only to particular kinds of citizens and exercised as the privilegeof particular social categories. I describe it, therefore, as a differentiatedcitizenship that uses these social qualifications to organize its political,civil, and social dimensions and to regulate its distribution of inequali-ties. The citizenship system thus created was universally inclusive inmembership but massively inegalitarian in distribution.

To maintain this differentiated citizenship in response to indepen-dence in 1822 and the abolition of slavery in 1888, ruling elites devel-oped a two-fold solution. To control political citizenship, they madesuffrage direct and voluntary but restricted it to the literate in 1881. Thisrestriction immediately reduced the electorate to a fraction of the popu-lation (about 1 percent). Moreover, in the Republic’s founding consti-tution (1891), they eliminated the right of citizens to a primaryeducation that would have given them the rudiments of literacy and thathad been enshrined (though not much realized) in the independencecharter (1824). Enacted with the stroke of a pen, the literacy restrictiondenied most Brazilians their political citizenship for an entire century,until it was repealed in 1985. To dominate civil and economic matters,elites created a real estate market to legitimate the ownership of private

property and finance the immigration of free labor. Adapting the Englishtheorist of colonialism E.G. Wakefield, they kept land prices high andwages low to deny the working masses legal access to land and indepen-dent production and to force them, as a result, to remain a source ofsemi-servile cheap labor. Thus, political and civil citizenship developedin step: both became more restrictive as Brazil changed from an imperialnation based on slave labor to a republican nation based on wage laborover the course of the 19th-century.

Subsequent regimes in the 20th century perpetuated this paradigm ofan inclusively inegalitarian citizenship by giving it modern urban indus-trial form, incorporating the new urban workers into a public sphere oflabor law without equality or autonomy. As a result of the persistence ofthis paradigm of differentiated citizenship, most Brazilians in 1972—when the court official was beaten—had been denied political rights,excluded from property ownership, estranged from law, incorporated intothe labor market as servile workers, and forced into segregated and oftenillegal conditions of residence in hinterlands that lacked infrastructure.

However, the new densities of urban life in these peripheries createda paradoxical possibility, that of developing a sphere of independenceprecisely in the interior and—from the perspective of central authority—remote spaces of neighborhoods in the peripheries. There, organizedaround the social life and necessities of residence, beyond immediatestate, party, and employer sanction, a new space of civic participation,rights, and collective imagination emerged.

Urban citizenship

The paradigm of differentiated citizenship remains contemporary,having survived—indeed nourished—every political regime overthe last 200 years, thriving under monarchy, military dictatorship,

and electoral democracy. It perdures through its enabling conditions:exclusion from property, denial of political rights, residential illegality,misrule of law, servility. However, these conditions changed after the1940s as the majority of Brazilians moved to cities and built the periph-eries. In the autoconstructed city, these very same historical sites ofdifferentiation fueled the irruption of an insurgent citizenship that desta-bilized the differentiated, as the urban poor gained political rights bybecoming functionally literate, established claims to property throughhouse building, established rights to urban infrastructure, made law anasset through their struggles with eviction, became modern consumers,and achieved personal competence through their experience of the city.These achievements validated their standing as city-builders. Moreover,they produced an unprecedented involvement in law that made theirleaders confident to confront justice officials with legal reasoning.

The sum of these experiences generated a new urban citizenshipamong residents in the poor peripheries based on three core processes.The first generated a new kind of participation in an alternative public

City & Society

sphere, one based on residents’ own grassroots organizations throughwhich they articulated their needs in terms of rights and in so doingconstituted an agenda of citizenship. The second gave them a newunderstanding of the basis of these rights and of their dignity as bearersof rights. The third transformed the relation between state and citizen,generating new legal frameworks, participatory institutions, and policy-making practices. I consider that these processes constitute an urbancitizenship when they develop under four conditions that all refer to thecity: when urban residence is the basis of mobilization; when the agendaof mobilization is about “rights to the city”; when the city is the primarypolitical community of comparison for these developments; and whenresidents legitimate this agenda of rights and participatory practices onthe basis of their contributions to the city itself.

Although I do not have space here to examine these three processesin depth, I want to highlight the quality of new civic participation andthe change in conception of rights as fundamental in developing thisinsurgent citizenship.8 Instead of domesticating the “dangerous classes,”the material and legal difficulties of autoconstruction politicized them,becoming core issues of grassroots organizations and movements. In waysthat contradict Chatterjee’s (2004) arguments about politics among theurban poor “in most of the world” (see Note 2), they formed intovoluntary associations to demand the regularization of their property andthe delivery of basic urban services as citizens who claim rights to thecity. Most of these organizations developed with considerable autonomyfrom the established domains of citizenship officially available to theworking classes. In effect, the very conditions of remoteness in theperipheries enabled an off-work and out-of-sight freedom to invent newmodes of association. Moreover, segregation motivated residents todemand inclusion in the legal city, in its property, infrastructure, andservices.

These mobilizations politicized people around the redistributiveclaims of rights to the city focused on the residential conditions of dailylife in the new autoconstructed peripheries. Residents demanded urban-ization of their neighborhoods, forcing the state to provide infrastructureand access to health services, schools, and child care. During the lasttwenty years, for example, the residents of Lar Nacional have wagedprotest campaigns for potable piped water, sewage lines, street paving,public lighting, bus service, trash collection, a preschool, and a healthclinic. Remarkably, they achieved all of these objectives—the soleexception being definitive title to their houselots.

In mobilizing these campaigns, women emerged as some of the mosteffective leaders of this new civic chorus of organized residents, thusachieving a doubly new and unsettling voice. They developed new strat-egies of protests and politicized motherhood as a means of makingdemands. Moreover, their engagements in the city yielded an unprec-edented knowledge of bureaucracy and law.9 With some of the men, theybecame researchers, investigating the requirements for each infrastruc-ture they demanded, conducting extensive archival investigations at

Instead of

domesticating the

“dangerous

classes,” the

material and legal

difficulties of

autoconstruction

politicized them,

becoming core

issues of grassroots

organizations and

movements

municipal departments, courts, and registries into land titles, subdivisionplans, surveyors’ records, and so forth, in an effort to unravel the tangledhistory of titles in the area and substantiate their own claims as good-faith buyers who had been swindled. In the process, they gained both alegal education and an idiom for engaging the state and its elites. One ofthe most active researchers and leaders in Lar Nacional, Arlete Silvestre,told me how she learned about the courts.

To tell the truth, I couldn’t even tell one court from another; Ididn’t know what their names meant or anything about them. Iwas a house-wife with a baby. I had only finished elementaryschool . . . I didn’t know anything, but I kept learning thingsafter I joined the [neighborhood association].

In becoming knowledgeable and pressing their demands, residentsconfronted the state with its negligence as provider of the well-being ofcitizens. In this confrontation, a much more autonomous sphere of self-interested and competent citizens emerged. It challenged a fundamen-tal conception of Brazilian society inherent in the modernizing statethat has dominated Brazil, namely, that Brazil’s masses are ignorantcitizens who are incapable of making competent decisions on their ownand who therefore need to be led into modernity by an enlightenedelite. In the insurgent formulation, by contrast, the residents of theperipheries imagine that their interests derive from their own experi-ences, not from state plans, and that they are informed and competentto make decisions.

The neighborhood associations also forged new horizontal confed-erations of citizens concerned with housing, land conflicts, infrastructure,human rights, and urban administration that became city-wide and evennational movements. The most significant was their massive participa-tion in framing the 1988 Constitution at the end of military rule. Thismovement turned the insurgent citizens of the urban peripheries into keyprotagonists in a national struggle over the democratic imagination of anew charter for Brazilian society. They fought not only to make theconstitution formally democratic. They insisted on participating directlyin its elaboration. Their objective was to insure that it embody theirexperiences—those of modern urban working classes—as a basic sourceof substantive rights and social justice.10

During the constitutional convention (1986–1988), combinationsof 288 plenary organizations, representing thousands of groups through-out Brazil, submitted 122 popular amendments, backed by more than12 million signatures. Some had more than 700,000 each. Many ofthese initiatives concerned new forms of guaranteeing popular partici-pation in the business of government and the management of citizenaffairs. For example, they require citizens to participate in developingannual municipal budgets, mandate public debates for master urbanplans, and create advisory citizen councils. They are, without doubt,innovations in participatory democracy. Other popular amendments

City & Society

that developed into constitutional principle and statutory law addressthe urban conditions of the poor, especially those of housing, landrights, and squatting. These are innovations in social justice. Bothtypes of innovation assume and require that the masses of Brazil, “silentand backward” just forty years prior, have become an organized partici-patory citizenry.11

This participatory citizenship so strongly marked the developmentof a democratic imagination among residents in the peripheries thatalmost ten years after the Constitutional Assembly (the AssembléiaConstituinte), I still noticed a striking lexical phenomenon in my inter-views. One woman in Lar Nacional told me: “It’s beautiful to read, look,I have this right. If you take the Constituinte to read—I have readvarious parts—you look at it and say: Wow, can this be a fairy tale? Isit true? But if I don’t use it, I won’t know if what is written reallyworks.” I first thought this use of Constituinte was an idiosyncratic errorin syntax. But after transcribing many interviews, I realized that thisswitching of terms is consistent: When residents talk about the Consti-tuição, they frequently use the word Constituinte instead. That is, theyoften refer to the text of the national charter by the agency—theirinsurgent agency—in making it.

Rights

Why do you think you have rights?

Well, one part is just what we were saying. I am an honest person,thank God. I don’t steal from anyone. I am a worker. I fulfill myobligations at home, with my family. I pay my taxes. But today Ithink the following: I have rights because the Constituinte [i.e.,Constitution] gives me these rights. But I have to run after myrights. I have to look for them. Because if I don’t, they won’t fallfrom the sky. Only rain falls from the sky. You can live here fiftyyears. You can have your things. But if you don’t run after yourrights, how are you going make them happen? [Resident ofJardim das Camélias since 1970, SAB member, retired textileworker]

The public spheres of citizenship that emerged in Brazilian peripheriesforced the state to respond to their new urban conditions by recog-nizing new kinds and sources of citizen rights. These rights con-

cerned issues of both substance and scope that the state’s existing lawsand institutions had generally neglected. In that sense, they developedon the margins of the established assumptions of governance: theyaddressed the new collective and personal spaces of daily life among thepoor in the urban peripheries; they concerned women and children aswell as men; they established duties to provide state services. Withoutdoubt, the greatest historical innovation of these rights is that they

initiate a reconceptualization: their advocates began to conceive of themas entitlements of general citizenship rather than of specifically differen-tiated categories of citizens, such as registered worker. In these ways, theemergence of new participatory publics in the peripheries not onlyexpanded substantive citizenship to new social bases. It also created newunderstandings and practices of rights.

Yet, as the statement above suggests, this foundation of rightsremains a mix of new and old formulations. As one of the failures ofresearch on “urban slums” has been to neglect changing conceptions ofrights, I want to emphasize their importance. When I ask residents in theneighborhoods why they think they have rights and on what basis, theyconsistently invoke an amalgam of three conceptions. As the textilework stated, they speak about rights as privileges of specific moral andsocial categories (“I am an honest worker”), as deriving from their stakesin the city (“I pay my taxes,” “I built my home and helped build thisneighborhood”), and as written in the Constitution (“the Constituintegives me rights”). In other words, they present a hybrid of what I callspecial treatment rights, contributor rights, and text-based rights. Thistypology has a temporal organization, following the strategies residentsdeploy in their housing and land conflicts. For example, text-based rightsappears only after the Constitutional Assembly and remains mixed withthe other two in discussion. This is not to say that people never referredto earlier constitutions and laws. But when a few occasionally did, it wasto complain that, with the exception of labor rights, these charters didnot apply to them.

In these three formulations, people use the same concept todescribe the realization of rights. They speak of “looking for your rights”or “running after them.” However, doing so generally means somethingdifferent in each case, with a different outcome. The conceptualizationof rights as the privilege of certain kinds of citizens has grounded, invarious incarnations, the entrenched system of differentiated citizen-ship. As long as it prevails, citizenship remains overwhelmingly a meansfor distributing and legitimating inequality. In the post-Constitutionperipheries, however, this conception confronts an insurgent one ofgeneralized text-based rights. The latter proposes that citizens have anunconditional worth in rights, not dependent on their personal social ormoral statuses. It therefore creates conditions for the realization of amore equalitarian citizenship. Organized around home ownership, theconcept of contributor rights ambiguously propagates both systems ofcitizenship. It does so because, although widespread, autoconstructionexcludes some residents (e.g., renters).12 But as it is universally recog-nized as the generator of the peripheries, it emphasizes the self-determination and accomplishment of residents, both individually andcollectively. It tends, therefore, to promote a citizenship of universal“autoconstruction” and has a kind of egalitarian agency absent from thedifferentiated paradigm. In the contemporary peripheries, all three con-ceptualizations of rights remain vital and mixed in the development ofcitizenship.

City & Society

Dangerous spaces of citizenship

Let me close by complicating this story of insurgent urban citizenship.Its study shows that the insurgent perpetuates key features of theentrenched. In Brazil, this means perpetuating the values of property

ownership, the practice of legalizing the illegal, and the norm of specialtreatment rights because insurgent citizens continue to use theseattributes in their reformulations of citizenship. Yet it also shows thatrather than merely nourish new versions of the hegemonic, the insurgentdisrupts: it remains conjoined with the entrenched, but in an unstableentanglement that corrodes both.

Under the political democracy that Brazilians achieved in 1985, thiscorrosion became perverse: as the working classes democratized urbanspace and its public, new kinds of violence, injustice, and impunityincreased dramatically. Brazilian cities experienced a generalized climateof fear, criminalization of the poor, criminal violence, support for policeviolence, abandonment of public space, and fortification of residence.The judiciary and the police became even more discredited. Thus, at themoment that democracy took root, the entanglement of democracy andits counters eroded some aspects of citizenship even as it expandedothers. This coincidence is the paradox of Brazil’s democratization.

Yet we would hardly expect insurgent citizenship to be stable in itsexpansion. It too has holes into which it collapses. Exactly because theold formulas of differentiated citizenship persist, new incivilities andinjustices arise with democratization. Hence the intertwining of thedifferentiated and the insurgent has contradictory effect. It erodes thecoherence of taken-for-granted categories of domination that gave dailylife its sense of order and security. If it did not, it would be inconsequen-tial. Democracy is not the only force of such destabilization, and it getstangled with others such as urbanization and privatization. But in itself,democracy provokes violent reactions, some to restore old paradigms oforder and others to express outrage that their elements—now morevisible because disrupted—persist. Thus democracy brings its own kindsof violence that irrupt where it destabilizes older formulations of orderand repression.

Emblematic of this unstable mix of old and new formulations ofcitizenship is the high levels of everyday violence by both criminals andpolice. This mix finds a particularly perverse expression in Braziliansociety when both criminal drug cartels and police-based death squadsuse the language of democratic rights and rule of law to justify theirespecially brutal violence.13 As much has now been written about theseeveryday and exceptional violences, I want to draw attention to otherexpressions in the urban public of the sense of violation and outrage thatthe unstable mix of insurgent and entrenched citizenships produces. Irefer to the in-your-face incivilities and aggressive aesthetics nowcommon in everyday public interactions in São Paulo. On the one hand,I refer to elite practices of fortifying and privatizing the city in the name

Thus, at the

moment that

democracy took

root, the

entanglement of

democracy and its

counters eroded

some aspects of

citizenship even as

it expanded others

of “security” that criminalize the poor; on the other, to a set of social andartistic practices developed in the poor peripheries that are also aggres-sive: the complex of hip-hop and funk that uses music, dancing, andgraffiti to homogenize and antagonize and that rejects the “made inBrazil” culture of inclusion, race mixing, and consensus consolidated inBrazilian popular music (MPB), carnaval, and capoeira for Americanizedidioms of racial and class polarization (see Caldeira 2006 for hip-hop inSão Paulo and Yúdice 1994 for funk in Rio); the affirmative actioncampaign in higher education that biologizes “race” and assigns Brazil-ians to bipolar categories (see Fry 2000; Htun 2004); the penetration bythe “servant classes” of residential spaces previously reserved for “mastersonly” (see Holston 2008:275–284); the falsification and display of elitecommodities to assert knowledge of and access to globalized fashion(ibid); everyday acts of transgression and “dissing” in public space (intraffic, for example) that indulge and in that sense celebrate the normof impunity. To those who for centuries have expressed their rulethrough the demonstration of privilege, all these practices replace expec-tations of lower-class deference and accommodation with attitudes ofnonnegotiation.

As Caldeira (2006) analyzes it, the rap music in the hip-hop move-ments of São Paulo is performed by young men who deliberately homog-enize the peripheries they identify with into spaces of despair, intoemblems of the worst inequality and violence: “They position themselvesin the peripheries, identify themselves as poor and black, express anexplicit class and racial antagonism, and create a style of confrontationthat leaves very little space for tolerance and negotiation. Their raps andliterature establish a nonbridgeable and nonnegotiable distance betweenrich and poor, white and black, center and periphery” (ibid:117). In adifferent idiom, graffiti “taggers” mainly from the peripheries “go all city,”to use the New York expression that characterized its graffiti movementin the 1970s. Targeting especially surfaces that seem least accessible, theyleave no cityscape unmarked by their repetitive verticalized script. Theirobjective is not only to assault by these means the security-driven priva-tizations of São Paulo. It is also to create a new visual public of citysurfaces that people cannot avoid seeing, a new urban skin that taggersknow most residents condemn as ugly, unintelligible, and criminal, asunequivocal proof of the deterioration of urban space and its public. Thepoint is that taggers celebrate that condemnation.

Can we view such incivilities as expressions of insurgent citizenship,as forms of protest and civic actions, when they seem intended to disruptassumptions about the sorts of inclusions, deferences, and hierarchiesthat have sustained differentiated citizenship? Indeed, elites predictablyview them not as new proximities but as intrusions into public anddomestic spaces they once ruled completely. Thus they respond by cre-ating new kinds of distance. Motivated by fear, suspicion, and outrage,elites withdraw from the sort of everyday personal contact that madetheir style of rule—their regime of differentiated citizenship—famous forits surface congenialities, ludic ambiguities, and apparent inclusions.

City & Society

Instead, they develop an array of new social and physical barriers. On theone hand, they exhibit explicit disdain. This mindset culminates in racistcriminalizations of the lower classes, which oppose human rights andsupport police violence. On the other, they wall themselves intoresidential and commercial enclosures, guarded by private security andhigh-tech surveillance, that make explicit the hard facts of the “know-your-place” rule that used to be far more implicit.

It may be stretching credibility to call these “marginal” idioms oftagging, rap, fashion, racial polarization, “dissing,” and defiance expres-sions of insurgent citizenship. Yet they do disrupt the ideologies of uni-versal inclusion that have sustained the ruling elite’s formulation ofdifferentiated citizenship. These ideologies effectively blur—in the senseof making less appreciable—its massively and brutally inegalitarian dis-tributions. Expressed in a variety of nationalist ideologies, cultural insti-tutions, and social conventions (e.g., “racial democracy,” carnaval, andplay of race classifications), the civility of the entrenched regime thusaccentuates inclusion, accommodation, ambiguity, and heterogeneity asidioms of social relation. These idioms of inclusion are further compli-mented by cultural conventions of seduction that give personal relationsof gender, racial, and economic difference a gloss of complicit accommo-dation, a sense of intimacy that obscures but maintains fundamentalinequalities: I refer to the seductive ambiguities produced through such(untranslatable) artifices as jetinho, malícia, malandragem, jinga, jogo decintura, and mineirice, and universalized in the institutions of samba,carnival, and capoeira—all celebrated in Brazilian culture but beyond mypurpose here to describe.

My point is that these ideologies and conventions of inclusion haveonly recently become less convincing. As insurgent citizenship disruptsthe differentiated, these dominant formulations of inclusion wear thinand the inequalities they cover become intolerable. Increasinglyexhausted, they get replaced in everyday relations by in-your-face inci-vilities. The problem for contemporary Brazilian society is that althoughthe inequitable distributions remain, their blurrings have lost efficacy.This exhaustion increasingly exposes the hard facts of inequality “forBrazilians to see.” Hence, in claiming the city through their variouspractices, those of both center and periphery view each other as speakingthrough idioms of insult.

The undeniable exaggerations of violence, injustice, and corruptionin the current period of political democracy may thus be considered inthese terms: the gross inequalities continue but the political and culturalpacts that have sustained them are worn out. This flaying of a social skintransforms city and society. It produces rawness, outrage, and exaggera-tion. In this sense we may say, perhaps, that the deep democratic changesembodied in this process necessarily produce incivility as a public idiomof resistance and insistence.

I conclude that although Brazil’s democratization has not been ableto overcome these problems, neither has the counter-configurationsof violence and injustice been able to prevent the development of

As insurgent

citizenship disrupts

the differentiated,

these dominant

formulations of

inclusion wear thin

and the inequalities

they cover become

intolerable

significant measures of democratic innovation. Above all, it has notprevented the widespread legitimation of an insurgent democratic citi-zenship. For the time being in Brazil, as in so many places, neitherdemocracy nor its counters prevails. Rooted, they remain entangled,unexpectedly surviving each other.

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Joshua Barker and Ato Quayson for theirinvitation to participate in the conference “Street Life” at the University of Torontoin 2007, for which I prepared this essay. Parts of it are drawn from my book InsurgentCitizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (2008). An earlierversion appeared in a bilingual Catalan/English edition, published as a booklet bythe Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

1In his study of politics among India’s urban poor, Chatterjee (2004) presents adifferent analysis. Although overwhelmingly based on Calcutta and without refer-ence to cases outside of India, he claims that his conclusions describe popular politics“in most of the world.” He dichotomizes Indian society into two spheres: a “civilsociety” that is the domain of “proper citizens” who are middle and upper-class elites,in contrast to a “political society” that is the domain of the rest of Indians who are“only tenuously rights-bearing citizens” and “not, therefore, proper members of civilsociety” at all but rather a “population” for the state to govern (38). Based on thisdichotomy, he describes the politics of the former in terms of citizenship and theurban conflicts of the latter in terms of governmentality and clientalistic patronage.I find this scheme both conceptually and empirically mistaken. The empirical workof other Indian researchers (see above) suggests a far more complex awareness ofrights among India’s urban poor. Furthermore, governmentality and citizenship arenot opposed as Chatterjee would have it but surely overlapping conditions. Citizensare both simultaneously and disjunctively targets of policy and participants in sov-ereignty, especially in contemporary cities where insurgent citizenship movementsturn those who are subject to government technologies into agents of rights aswell—as I analyze with a Brazilian example in the following sections.

2See Rabinow (1989) and Rose and Osborne (1999) for studies of the patholo-gization of 19th-century European cities. During this period, both government andmedical science came to view rapid urbanization and the urban conditions for masspopulations it produced as the generator of multiple pathologies—of disease, crime,revolution, and moral degeneracy—and therefore targeted them as legitimateobjects of intervention and regulation. See Coleman 1982 for a history of thisepidemiology. For industrial, modernist, and suburban planning responses, seeRabinow (1989), Le Corbusier (1973), Holston (1989), and Nicolaides and Wiese(2006).

3Examples include Davis (2006) and Neuwirth (2006). With the rise of newpandemics (e.g., HIV/AIDS and SARS), cities are once again being viewed asradiating nodes of infection. In the 21st century, however, the stakes are presentedas global. The prime targets for new systems of surveillance and response have shiftedto cities of the global south and their extraordinary rates of urbanization. The current“urban catastrophe” literature views these cities as sites of emerging pathogens thatare especially lethal because they spread through the very global flows that constitutecontemporary urbanization. See Davis and Siu (2007) and Morse (1995). I thankLyle Fearnley for these references.

City & Society

4Let me emphasize a point often misunderstood by outsiders (Brazilian andforeign): the majority of “slum dwellers” in most Brazilian cities, of those who live inthe poor peripheries, are good-faith purchasers of house lots in subdivisions (lotea-mentos) who have been defrauded in one form or another. They are not squatters anddo not live in favelas. A favela is a land seizure without any payment and is only oneof several types of illegal land occupation in Brazil’s urban landscape. Thus, favelaresidents have no claims to land ownership, although they own their houses—anownership that the state generally recognizes in various ways. In São Paulo, forexample, approximately 10 percent of the municipal population lives in favelas.Although in a few neighborhoods in São Paulo and in some cities—notably Rio deJaneiro—it is as high as 30 or 40 percent, these are exceptions. I do not want tominimize the importance of favelas as home to poor Brazilians. After all, 10 percentof São Paulo’s municipal population is more than one million people. But the moreimportant point is that dividing the Brazilian urban world into a dichotomy of favelasfor the poor and fortified enclaves for the rich is demographically and morphologi-cally false. This world is infinitely more complex, tangled, contradictory, and vital.For further discussion of differences and relations between poor lot owners andsquatters in São Paulo and of the significant but decreasing importance of thisdistinction for citizen mobilization, see Holston (2008) and Caldeira and Holston(2005).

5That it is generally only the most active members of neighborhood organiza-tions who exhibit the competence of law talk is beside the point for my argumentsabout new citizenship. Although the rank and file typically do not understand thecomplex legal reasoning involved and are unable to produce it, they refer problemsto those who do—namely, their community leaders and attorneys—rather thanexpress their frustrations violently. Neighborhood leaders and archives constitute acollective resource that residents as a group construct and utilize individually andcollectively when necessary. Thus, law talk among them is publicized, generalized,and becomes public knowledge.

6I draw my use of power and liability here from Hohfeld’s (1978) correlativescheme of socio-legal relations. Both the civil law tradition (descendant fromRoman law and dominant in Europe and Latin America) and the common (Anglo-American) recognize these relations in somewhat different ways. The former holdsthat objective law is the rule to which an individual must conform, and subjectiveright is the power of an individual that derives from the rule. The latter uses thenotion of remedy, which entails empowerment, holding that where there is a rightthere must be a remedy.

7A fuller account is found in Holston (2008).8See my book Insurgent Citizenship, especially 203–267, for a detailed historical

and ethnographic examination of these processes of change.9See also Caldeira’s (1990) analysis of the emergence of women leaders

in the residentially-based social movements of the peripheries of SãoPaulo.

10The history of this organized popular participation in the ConstitutionalAssembly is related in Michiles et al. (1989).

11On the new forms of democratic participation and association, see Avritzer(2004) (for essays on São Paulo). For a discussion of participatory budgeting, seeAbers (2000) and Baiocchi 2005; and for new democratic initiatives in urbanplanning, Caldeira and Holston (2005).

12The rates of home ownership in the peripheries of São Paulo are remarkablyhigh, between 70 percent and 90 percent according to various measures (see Holston2008:183–84). These rates include squatters, who generally own their homes but notthe land. Thus, the identity of home owner is overwhelming though not quiteuniversal in the peripheral neighborhoods.

13On violence, crime, and fortification during the contemporary period of politi-cal democracy in São Paulo, the classic study is Caldeira (2000). On the use of thelanguage of democracy, rights, and justice by both gangs and police, see Caldeira(2006) and Holston (2008:271–309).

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HOLSTON, James - Insurgent Citizenship

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